If you are upgrading from 5.0, please review the upgrade information first before diving in.

The packages take care of backward compatibility with the older .so.15 client library (5.1 has .so.16), including on CentOS 5 (no separate “compat” RPM required).

This release for the first time also has packages (in YUM repo) for RHEL/CentOS 5. The MariaDB RPMs should purposely conflict with any 5.0, as well as any 5.1 of different origin, so that you consciously have to choose to upgrade and won’t accidentally end up for instance automatically upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1. We say should because while we tested various scenarios, the real world is bound to teach us more. Just be cautious, and please file bugs if you spot anything weird.

We didn’t build RHEL/CentOS 4 RPMs, because it originally came with MySQL 4.1 which is ancient, this means that other packages on that system have a dependency on libmysqlclient.so.14. If you do have a need for RHEL 4 packages, please let us know.

Generic Linux binary tarballs and the base source tarball to create all builds are also available, although to recreate one of the packages it’s easiest to use the relevant source package.

Please enjoy, and if you encounter any problems, file bugs with OurDelta or MariaDB on Launchpad.

If you’d like to keep up to date about MariaDB developments, there is a Planet MariaDB. If you have a feed relevant for MariaDB, you can submit it through the site.

What are the requirements? Having a server with HTTP access and no hassles with low traffic limits. At this stage you’ll need about 5GB disk space, and you’ll use rsync to sync from the master servers (we’ll provide you with a script to help with that). Thanks!

With the new releases the traffic is up (not surprising) and while our existing mirrors appear to be doing ok so far, it’ll be good to have more available before we run into capacity or speed problems. We also haven’t yet split for geographic location, that too becomes a possibility with more mirrors.

Monty has merged/rewritten the microslow patch, so (most of) the detail/filtering you’ve become used to from the 5.0 OurDelta builds are there. All the Percona InnoDB patches are of course in the XtraDB plugin.

For Debian/Ubuntu, you will find a nice baseline my.cnf that, among other sane settings, defaults to InnoDB and strict mode by default – just like the Windows config wizard has done for a few years already.

The GRAPH computation engine didn’t quite make this build, but if you’d like us to build the plugin library for you for any of these distros/architectures, just ask. For DIY, you can just grab the exact source tarball we used to build the MariaDB packages, compile the plugin against it from the launchpad repo and copy the .so library to the plugin directory. Instructions are in the docs and the engine/INSTALL file.

Lots more to tell, but that would make it not be a quick overview 😉

Please enjoy, and if you encounter any problems, file bugs with OurDelta or MariaDB. Don’t worry about picking the right project, if you get it wrong Launchpad lets us toss it across, and some bugs actually require fixes on both ends so they get attached to both!

If you’d like to keep up to date about MariaDB developments, there is a Planet MariaDB. If you create a feed relevant for MariaDB, you can submit it through the site.

Some of you may have run the mysql-test-run tool which is the MySQL test suite. But did you know there are actually multiple suites? If you just run the tool, you don’t get everything!

Check out the mysql-test/suites subdirectory. That’s all the stuff you don’t get when just running the tool normally. If you take a peek at the Makefiles, you will find a target test-bt (build team) which shows the extra calls and parameters for the additional suites.

OurDelta has had some interesting cases where a build that’s otherwise ok would fail when users tried the test suite on their installation. We reckon such a test should definitely pass, and thus we had some more homework to do. So now OurDelta builds with as many tests as exist enabled, on all platforms and architectures. Slow yes, but that’s not an argument to not test something, right? Failing tests are often indicative of other issues, so at the very least they merit some attention.

For instance… we found that on some platforms, the default distro packages are actually broken in fairly interesting ways. The testsuite in particular falls victim to this, making one wonder whether the distros actually test what they build, and which tests they do.

We’ve been able to do MySQL 5.1 binary tarballs for a bit now (great working together with Kristian Nielsen of Monty Program), but packages are bit more tricky. Peter has been working on Debian/Ubuntu while I’ve focused on RH/CentOS. The following is from an OurDelta (trial build run) RPM install on CentOS 5 x64:

Last year, Erik Ljungstrom (sensei in the #ourdelta IRC channel on Freenode) created patch for a bug Arjen identified with the handling of (among others) the open-files-limit option; the patch was first included in the OurDelta build of MySQL 5.0.67.

Now, Sun engineer Guilhem Bichot has committed the (modified) patch into the 6.0-maria tree, so it should appear in 6.0 and potentially 5.4. That’s good.

We had to apply a weird tweak as the default Ubuntu Jaunty packages are named something like 5.1.30really-5.0.xx. Several people have filed bugs on it with Ubuntu on Launchpad.

What I suspect happened (unconfirmed!) is that Canonical was contemplating putting 5.1 into Jaunty, had it in a beta but went back to 5.0 before release. Since downgrading by version number is a manual process in apt-get, the above hack allows a downgrade that looks like an upgrade…

Our original Jaunty build worked fine if you were starting from scratch, however an upgrade from the default MySQL on Jaunty would not work. Peter has built 5.1.30really-5.0.77-d8-ourdelta, which upgrades happily from the default Jaunty install or any other earlier install (such as from Intrepid). If you upgrade from an earlier Ubuntu version, do make sure you fix up your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ourdelta.list with the release name jaunty. Easy as. Then run apt-get update then apt-get upgrade.